Near the end of February, at an event sponsored by Greater Rochester Chamber of Commerce, the invited speaker, Brian Gottlob of PolCon Research, did not curry favor by telling his audience of business people what they wanted to hear. While the business community, and everyone else for that matter, would like to be told that the deep economic recession is at an end, and that the state and the region will now steadily recover in the traditional way into years of prosperity, that’s not the way Gottlob reads his economic tea leaves.

Moving ahead to the first week in March, a Chamber audience comprising many of the same people as before, received a rather different message — that Rochester is in good financial shape, and that the city’s prospects in the coming year or two, commercially and industrially, are extremely promising.

Since then, the first set of figures for 2013 have been released by the New Hampshire Employment Security (NHES) office. Just like those twin presentations, the January job numbers convey two strands of information that, at first glance, seem to be at odds with each other. The number of jobs held by New Hampshire residents actually rose, although only by a small fraction of a percent, over the past year, but yet the number of unemployed people went up by almost 5,000 people, driving the state’s unemployment rate higher.

The explanation for this is that the NH labor force, between January 2012 and January 2013 rose by almost 6,000 people. This brings us to the so called “discouraged” workers — to use the tag that the Bureau of Labor Statistics employs. These are folks who have not actively looked for work in the past four weeks, and, accordingly, are removed from the labor force, to lurk in the statistical shadows like economic zombies. People who have not looked for a job in over a year, by the way, do not even exist in the shadows.

As an aside, we would say these folks are not so much “discouraged” as pragmatic, not wishing to burn up expensive gas driving around seeking jobs that don’t exist.

We think that over the past year, as the economic situation has eased a bit in most of the country, this slightly heartening news, trickling out via the media, has tempted the “discouraged” to venture out from hibernation once again, like groundhogs sensing the first days of spring. Thus they get picked up in the January jobless numbers, but, if Gottlob is right, many of these workers are destined for disappointment, for the economist sees no significant New Hampshire job-creating engine, when peering into the future.

We will have to wait until late April to see what effect the mini-surge in the labor force has had on the gap between the U-3 and the U-6 unemployment numbers for New Hampshire for the first quarter of the year.

The U-3 number is the monthly unemployment rate issued by NHES, and it comes in two flavors — unadjusted, which is the most accurate number (and used by the Rochester Times), and seasonally adjusted, the purpose of the latter being to smooth out events like post-Christmas layoffs.

The U-6 number, which takes into account the “discouraged” workers, and the many thousands of people who are working part-time, but who would like full-time jobs, has been running at twice the U-3 rate — 11.2 percent for 2012, compared to the U-3 rate of 5.6 percent — and that’s without counting anyone who has not sought work for a year or more.

If the NH economy truly improves as 2013 progresses, more part-time workers will get full-time jobs, and more “discouraged” workers will start looking for jobs and then appear in the U-3 numbers. Thus the U3-U6 gap should start to close.

A couple of recessions ago, as the clouds began to darken, an economist predicted that Rochester would be “an economic hotspot.” For the record, it wasn’t, but this time, if Rochester officials’ cheeriness is justified, it might become one. Thus, it is possible that both they and Gottlob, will be correct in their assessments. The city may grow, economically, while the state as a whole may tread.